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22 May 2009

How many of us have had appointments we missed because we forgot? Essential tasks or deadlines not met because we didn’t keep track of the time while working?

Many times, I have moaned that my Microsoft Outlook doesn’t do what I want it to do, namely maintain my schedule to my satisfaction, because it has to be on for it to work. But 95% of the time, I don’t need Outlook to be on all the time, chewing away at my resources.

My work-around use to be to use the ReminderFox extension in Firefox. However, that meant maintaining 2 calendars, (and Google Calendar was available only upon logging in… not very convenient). And it meant having Firefox on as well, because if it was not on, the extension doesn’t work.

Yesterday, I discovered a nifty little tool that put my Microsoft Outlook calendar on my desktop. It’s only 578 KB, and is called Outlook on the Desktop.

As you can see from the photo, it leaves an opaque calendar window on the desktop. The window is highly customable in that you can change the level of transparency, the size, the position on the desktop, all from a nice user-friendly GUI.

Not only that, you can edit directly into this window to make changes to your Outlook calendar.

It’s a free project, meaning that the software is made available free of charge, but if you can, donate a few dollars.